11 for ’13: Richard Gomer believes we will be able to treat smoke inhalation victims

On the cusp of 2013, I’ve invited 11 of the greater Houston area’s top minds to write about something they believe, but cannot prove. A new entry in the 11 for ’13 series will be published each morning during the holidays.

There are lots of things most people believe to be true but cannot prove – ideas about the origin of the universe, religion, whether decency will eventually prevail over greed, and a variety of more specific topics such as whether we will collectively deal with climate change.

As a biologist, I’ve seen colleagues damage their careers by clinging to a belief about something they’re studying, even when there is strong evidence that they’re wrong, and I’ve observed that most of the time when I make a prediction about how something works in a biological system, I’ve been wrong. So I’ve learned to channel belief into hope, and when the data show that the previous idea was wrong, just move forward and develop a new hypothesis or hope.

Gomer was one of the State Bar of Texas’ 2011 Texas Inventors of the Year.

One current hope is that we have stumbled onto a potential therapeutic for a disease called acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS. A major cause of ARDS is massive smoke inhalation, for instance from a house fire, resulting in lung damage. The damage causes immune system cells called neutrophils to leave the blood and enter the lungs, but paradoxically the neutrophils increase lung damage, which then causes more neutrophils to enter the lungs, leading to a vicious cycle of damage and neutrophil entry that results in the death of 40% of ARDS patients.

Rice Biochemistry and Cell Biology graduate student Jonathan Phillips found that a protein called AprA secreted by colonies of a soil organism acts as a repellent, causing cells to crawl away from the colony. Texas A&M Biology grad student Sarah Herlihy found that AprA has similarity to a human blood protein called DPPIV. We tested the crazy idea that DPPIV might act as a repellent for human cells and, to our amazement, found that DPPIV causes neutrophils to crawl away from a source of DPPIV.

We then tested the even crazier idea that putting DPPIV into the lungs would act as a neutrophil repellent in a mouse model of ARDS, and to our delight found that inhaled DPPIV does indeed repel neutrophils out of the lungs back into the blood. So maybe inhaled DPPIV might be useful as a therapy for ARDS. I’m probably wrong, but hey, there’s always hope.

To see other 11 for ’13 entries, click here. And you can click here see entries from the 11 for ’11 series that I published a year ago, and here for the 11 for ’12 series.